38 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

that of Babel; then you remember Gideon beating down the tower of Penuel, in order more completely to humble the pride of the men of the city; you remember the defence of the tower of Shechem against Abimelech, and the death of Abimelech by the casting of a stone from it by a woman’s hand; you recollect the husbandman building a tower in his vineyard, and the beautiful expressions in Solomon’s song,-“The tower of Lebanon, which looketh towards Damascus;” “I am a wall, and my breasts like towers;”-you recollect the Psalmist’s expressions of love and delight, “Go ye round about Jerusalem; tell the towers thereof: mark ye well her bulwarks; consider her palaces, that ye may tell it to the generation following.”¹ You see in all these cases how completely the tower is a subject of human pride, or delight, or defence, not in any wise associated with religious sentiment; the towers of Jerusalem being named in the same sentence, not with her temple, but with her bulwarks and palaces. And thus, when the tower is in reality connected with a place of worship, it was generally done to add to its magnificence, but not to add to its religious expression. And over the whole of the world, you have various species of elevated buildings, the Egyptian pyramid, the Indian and Chinese pagoda, the Turkish minaret, and the Christian belfry,-all of them raised either to make a show from a distance, or to cry from, or swing bells in, or hang them round, or for some other very human reason. Thus, when the good people of Beauvais were building their cathedral, that of Amiens, then just completed, had excited the admiration of all France; and the people of Beauvais, in their jealousy and determination to beat the people of Amiens, set to work to build a tower to their own cathedral as high as they possibly could. They built it so high that it tumbled down, and they were never able to finish their cathedral at all-it stands a

¹ [The Bible references here are Judges viii. 17, ix. 48-53; Matthew xxi. 33; Mark xii. 1; Song of Solomon vii. 4, viii. 10; Psalms xlviii. 12, 13. With the last passage compare Eagle’s Nest, § 240 ad fin.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]